Will Afghanistan be the Next Iraq?

The shadow of Iraq’s post-war failure is creeping over Afghanistan as it crumbles into political crisis just months ahead of the drawdown of U.S. military support. The sight of armored personnel carriers onthe main roads into Kabul coupled with urging from the United Nations for supporters of presidential candidates to stop their calls for civil disobedience raised the specter of a slide into chaos. For days it has seemed that President Hamid Karzai would not be leaving his palace any time soon. 

The prospect of Afghanistan heading for its own version of the meltdown happening in Iraq — insurgents filling a vacuum created by the departure of American troops; domestic security forces incapable of doing their job; and a government lacking legitimacy for the whole population — has clashed with hopes for a trouble-free presidential election and a smooth segue into sovereignty.

The decision by one of the candidates, Abdullah Abdullah, to challenge the official bodies overseeing Afghanistan’s presidential election followed an announcement by the Independent Election Commission within hours of the polls closing on June 14 that seven million people had voted in a country with only rudimentary methods of collating national data. Some numbers appeared to exceed population estimates for certain regions.

Abdullah polled well in the first round of voting, on April 5, but fell short of the majority needed for a victory. His rival, Ashraf Ghani, was trailing but appeared to pick up support in the June 14 run-off, later attributed to alleged massive vote rigging, or "sheep stuffing," as the local parlance would have it.

With a winner due to be announced on July 22, Abdullah said he had evidence of fraud in Ghani’s favor and demanded that vote counting cease: tapes of phone conversations he alleges prove his accusations are true. His team is adamant that, rather than use the law to flag irregularities once the count was complete, he made the right decision to disrupt the process and throw the entire presidential contest  — and the country’s political stability — into doubt.  

Ghani said his votes were clean and that he would continue to cooperate with electoral bodies, while Abdullah blamed Karzai for orchestrating the crisis. A source close to the political process said that Karzai was "staying put in the presidential palace."  

While some observers think this could have been Karzai’s endgame all along, others believe Karzai has neither the support nor the will to stay in office. 

"It is just a matter of time while this plays itself out and then Ghani will be president, according to the plan all along, and Abdullah is finished," said an academic source who travels to Afghanistan often but asked not to be named. He noted the timing of President Obama’s announcement of a residual military force, made between the two elections, and Washington’s silence on the current crisis to support his contention.

A trouble-free transition of democratic power — what would have been the country’s first — was a condition of continued international financial support after most foreign troops are withdrawn at the end of the year. Obama wants 9,800 troops in a training and advisory role until the end of 2016, contingent on a bilateral security agreement that both challengers have said they will sign.

U.S. forces were pulled out of Iraq in 2011, after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to comply with an extra-territorial condition in the State of Forces bilateral agreement proposed by Washington. This is now seen as having helped create the conditions that led to the current crisis.

Afghans were already watching developments in Iraq before Abdullah’s drama began unfolding. International troops have protected Karzai and his government –reelected in a 2009 poll (also tainted by extensive fraud) after Abdullah refused to go to a second round — for more than a decade, and that responsibility will fall to Afghan security forces on Jan. 1, 2015.  

The Afghan National Army suffers high attrition, drug addiction and illiteracy, and low morale. Antonio Giutozzi, of King’s College London, said in a report released by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit in May, that "a serious political crisis at the top (for example, following the 2014 presidential elections) would weaken state legitimacy further and seriously damage morale in the ANA." 

Like Iraq’s forces, Afghanistan’s military and police were built by the occupying powers on a model they created. The same teams that trained the Iraqi security forces have worked in Afghanistan, where salary payments are unreliable and the government’s lack of revenue sources to replace the international military and aid flows could lead to a rise in defections to the insurgency, which pays in cash. 

The fall of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in early June was reminiscent of events in 2003; then, too, Iraqi soldiers melted away, leaving their uniforms in heaps on street-corner and their helmets rolling in the gutters. Then, we thought we understood why:  They’d been pressed to defend the indefensible Saddam Hussein. This time, they weren’t up to the job of securing the city, despite U.S. efforts to build a competent state security apparatus, and lacked the support of a public that regarded the army as a tool of government suppression.  

The terrorist group ISIS is exploiting that dissatisfaction with the Baghdad government to set Sunni against Shia. Kurds, for their part, are defending their territory in the north. Nechirvan Barzani, the Kurdish prime minister, has said the country could fragment, raising the possibility of the northern Kurdish territory moving closer to the West, and the south coming under intensifying Iranian control.

Karzai told the BBC this month that what is happening in Iraq could never happen in Afghanistan. "Never. Not at all. We are a united country." He cited the will of the Afghan people and the performance of the Afghan security forces in keeping the insurgency at bay.

Afghanistan’s potential fault lines are largely ethnic, rather than religious. Abdullah is of mixed Tajik and Pashtun background and has strong support from the largely Tajik north thanks to leaders such as the governor of Balkh province, Atta Mohammad Noor, a former Tajik mujahedeen commander who openly campaigned for him.  

Ghani, a Pahstun, is expected to continue Karzai’s effort to broker peace with the Taliban, and thus is seen as a Taliban sympathizer who could lead a Pashtun takeover of the government, according to a Kabul-based journalist who asked not to be identified. Ghani pulled in the bulk of the Uzbek vote through his running mate, Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek leader with a reputation for brutality. Atta and Dostum are long-time rivals. 

Ghani could have benefited, according to reports, from a higher turnout in the second round among Pashtuns in south and east. There are unconfirmed reports that some former anti-Taliban resistance groups, mainly Tajiks, in the north are arming in preparation for a fight against any Pashtun takeover of the electoral process.

One observer of Afghan politics, speaking anonymously, said Abdullah, in effectively accusing Karzai, a Pashtun, of mobilizing his formidable political resources in Ghani’s favor, has poked a hornet’s nest that has compromised not only the election process, but potentially a peaceful transition of the presidency and a well-ordered move from occupation to sovereignty.

ISIS has proved that lack of governance creates a vacuum for insurgents and terrorists to fill. The Taliban did so after Afghanistan’s civil war but it is unlikely they could do the same today: Not only do they not have public support, they appear to be struggling financially. Where ISIS has been robbing banks and picking up oil assets as it goes, the Taliban have been extending the begging bowl. In April they admitted they were "in dire need of financial assistance from the Muslim brothers worldwide for its military and non-military expenditures." 

Karzai is a clever political tactician who can point to many achievements, not least holding the country together, and appears determined to end the war with a limited role for the Taliban. He has appeared willing to sacrifice some of the gains of the past decade — women’s rights, free media — for peace.  

After more than 30 years of war, Afghans are exhausted. Yet there are concerns of a return to patronage and warlordism, with vested interests taking advantage of political uncertainty and economic austerity to step up their jockeying for control of territory and assets. Historical precedent exists, and this time bigger boys than the Taliban are in the frame.  

While Abdullah believes, according to a source in his camp, that he has done the right thing "for the country," Afghan politicians are not known for their altruism. In bypassing the law as the legitimate avenue for pursuing his complaints, Abdullah has scuppered his chances for statesmanship. Failure to achieve electoral victory could well end his ambition to become Afghanistan’s president. 

The situation in Kabul was described to me as "volatile" by the Afghan journalist, who also points out that there are still tens of thousands of foreign troops in the country, a possible bulwark against violence though, the academic said, "it’s not likely they’d get involved, outside Kabul, if factional fighting did break out." 

The post-2014 political landscape of Afghanistan is unclear, but this does not presage a descent into the terrorism engulfing Iraq and threatening its neighbors. Rather, it appears that Karzai’s man, with the tacit support of his most important sponsors, will prevail and give him the chance to bring a lasting, albeit conditional, peace to his country and lay down that legacy he so desperately seeks.   

Lynne O’Donnell is an award-winning journalist based in London. Her book on the Iraq war, "High Tea in Mosul," was published in 2007. She has been reporting on Afghanistan since 2001.